Transport Planning
Planning of daily trips for approximately 90 SPF-vehicles is rather extensive work. There is a large amount of data that must be taken into consideration before any SPF-vehicle gets on to the road.
Some of these data are:
- Addresses of suppliers and recipients
- The amount of pigs and their size
- Delivery day, and special requests as for the time of day
- Health status of the two herds (more than 100 different health status can be found in "the system")
- Transport order, i.e. prior to a quarantine of 12 hours the truck must not transport any pigs with a higher health status than the ones that have just been on the truck.
- Availability of trucks
- The trucks' capacity
- The legal requirements for the protection of pigs during transport (e.g. the floorage per pig and time of transport below or above 8 hours)
- The driver's time of rest/work
- The distance between supplier and recipient
- The utilisation rate of the truck, i.e. its capacity must be exploited as close to 100% as possible
- The economy of the individual trip must be at an optimum
The entire amount of data is encoded in the electronic planning system that helps the planner to set out a rough schedule. While fine-tuning, should he organise the trips in a wrong way the system will warn him. This is of particular significance, because health and the risk of infection is of paramount importance.
The work screen of a transport planner. To the left are the individual carriages line-for-line, and different colour markings indicate the health status of the scheduled load. To the right the trip details for a specific truck are visible.
